Howdy, I know this sounds like a silly question and I never thought I would have to ask such a basic question like this. I bought a external hard drive enclosure and was trying to install a hard drive I had laying around. The screws that come with the enclosure doesn't fit. The screws have a coarse thread and it seems the drive case has fine threads. It's the only screws that come with it so it has to be for that purpose. Anyway, I dug around my screw bin and found a few screws that fit better but still not quite right. I went to ebay and typed in 100 hard drive screws. I want to buy a bag of them to have around when I need them. It's amazing what I got for results. Some list a brand they fit. Some say laptop, few mention a desktop system. Looking at pics, some seem to be coarse thread, some sort of fine thread. Some standard, some metric. Some are phillips head and some look like allen type or star type heads. I'm sitting here wondering, is this nuts or what? Pardon the pun there. It's just crazy. lol
Is there not a standard sized screw that should fit all 3.5" and even 2.5" drives?? Whether they are spinning rust, SSD or the outdated floppy drives. Are they THAT different or are the pictures misleading? If there is a standard or does WD take one size screw while Seagate takes another and Toshiba yet another? If someone has found a size that fits them all, could you please share the sizes or a link so I can have something to go by? I already have a few hundred screws that don't fit. I really don't need yet another 100 to add to the don't fit anything pile. What happened to the simple days where things would just fit like they should?? ^_O Thanks for any hints. Dale :-) :-) P. S. The enclosure I got is a eSATA or USB type. I use the eSATA connector. Found it on Amazon and it's a Rosewill. The enclosure not long ago was about $60 each. I got two for $54 with free shipping. It has a temp controlled fan too. I bought other USB only enclosures that wasn't worth the shipping much less the cost of the item. I think I had one that worked fairly well but was really slow. Maybe it was USB2 but I suspect it was defaulting to USB1. A few others failed after a short time, I suspect USB issues myself. I still need to run up on a good deal on a PMR type 8TB drive, designed for 24/7 use. I need to expand /home. It's at 70% right now. o_O